I can't believe that this cra* is still taken seriously by some people. Red Cross did NOT give numbers showing “only” 271k dead Jews in the Holocaust.

Holocaust deniers are possessed by two photocopies of documents which allegedly prove 'only' 275k deaths in Nazi concentration camps. The photocopy of the first document is fraudulently edited [Anzahl means “number” (not total deaths), the document actually comes from Sonderstandesampt Arolsen (not the Red Cross), the English words that appear, in a different font, on the image of the first German document were obviously added by whoever published it (the Germans did not call their country "West Germany")].

The second document even clearly says (read the underlined text): “The certification numbers of the Special Registry Office do not allow for any conclusions about the actual numbers of the dead in the concentration camps.”

It is actually number of postwar death certificates issued on request of the few surviving relatives.

That the data is not complete is also evident to anyone not ignorant of the basic facts about the camp death toll statistics. For example, Auschwitz death books and Auschwitz books of deceased Soviet POW written by the SS during the war [which cointain only names of perished REGISTERED prisoners (most Auschwitz victims were murdered immediately after arrival) and which are not complete (there are no death records from 1944 (most people who were deported to Auschwitz were deported to the camp in 1944) and 1940, many records from 1941–1943 period are lost (this fact is accepted even by deniers’ gurus)] cointain roughly 74,000 names (more than the numbers given in both documents), according to Korherr report which was written in 1943 by German statistic Richard Korherr more than 14,000 registered Jewish prisoners died in Lublin concentration camp in 1942 (also more than the numbers given in both documents), Buchenwald death records left behind by the SS cointain more than 33,000 names (also more than the numbers given in both documents). And don't forget that the lists does not include victims of pure extermination camps Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno. Roughly 2,5 million Jews were killed outside of camps (Einzatzgruppen mass killing operations, starvation in ghettoes in Poland and Soviet Union).

And Red Cross exciplitly denied that they have statistics with total camps deaths.

Red cross exposure of “false propaganda”

More information:

Rebutting the "Twitter denial": the most popular Holocaust denial memes debunked

Das Sonderstandesamt Arolsen und der ITS

Alright, so there is a document from the German Red Cross that lists the total number of dead Jewish people as 271k. This document does exist. The problem is that it’s pretty much worthless. When you cherry-pick documents and then present them without context, it can lead to inaccurate information.

It’s funny- in a sick sort of way- that deniers wholesale dismiss the validity of so many documents while clinging to like 3. The endless documents they dismiss as “lies” or “fakes” are actually authentic validated historical documents and the 3 (actually like 2) they use are outright bad.

Q: Why did the Red Cross say only 271k Jews died in the Holocaust (which is the implication of the question)?

A: They didn’t- ever.

Q: Why is there a Red Cross document that says only 271k Jews died in the Holocaust?

A: There isn’t

Now I couldn’t find photos of this document because it is just very unimportant, but I do know it exists. Some say the documents list 71k dead, others say 200k, and so on- it’s an old argument. If a denier ever brings up the “Red Cross” followed by any number, this is what they mean.

The long and short is that this document is just a list of all the Jewish death certificates the German Red Cross had received from the German Government. It is not a list of all the deaths the Red Cross reported nor a list of those who died in the Holocaust- it is just a report that details the number of death certificates sent to the Red Cross in an official capacity during WW2.

The Nazis were trying to cover up and obfuscate the Holocaust as soon as it started. They burned documents, they destroyed gas chambers, they killed witnesses, and they even dug up mass graves to burn the corpses. Likely they knew that they couldn’t actually hide it, but they thought that if they won the war, they could convince everyone that the Jews had indeed been “transported East.”

The Germans were not going to painstakingly make out 6 million correct death certificates and then send those to a non-government organization. Think about it. If Germany accurately reported death certificates then…

1. The German Government would be fully admitting they are committing genocide. They would be doing this in the midst of a world war. The backlash from Germans and non-Germans would be immense. It’s one thing to hear horrible rumors, it’s another to hear the facts.
2. This would mean that the Nazis went to the effort to record every murder in an industrial-scale ethnic cleansing campaign. They were killing as many people as they could as fast as they could- there was no time taken to collect IDs, verify IDs, make out a death certificate, transport millions of these certificates from the countryside to a central government office, collate the data from said certificates, and then publicize said info. Why do that? Instead, they just counted how many they murdered and reported that number.

Here is the other “document” deniers love. It’s the “Sterbebücher” of Auschwitz (the death books).

These books, of which there are 46 volumes, list the deaths of 69,000 prisoners. So deniers use this to say there is no way 1.1 million were killed at Auschwitz because there were only 69,000 prisoners listed as dead.

People reading this are smart (well except for a few we may see in the comments) and can likely see the issue but I’ll make it black and white.

1. These volumes ONLY cover people admitted to the camp as laborers. At Auschwitz, you could either be taken into the camp to be used as a slave or murdered in the gas chamber upon arrival. Of the 1.1 million Jews sent to Auschwitz, about 90% (800k to 900k) were gassed and killed the second they arrived. These poor souls never made it into any “death list” because like I said- Germany wasn’t keeping evidence like that around.
2. The volumes ONLY cover prisoners admitted from 1941–1943. A few years are missing needless to say
3. These volumes almost exclusively record non-Jews. This means POWs, Poles, Slavs, political prisoners, Greeks, and so on.

So this isn’t really “hard” evidence, is it?

Again these documents are cherry-picked. In their full context, they are decent historical documents. One shows that at least 271k Jews were reported “dead” by Germany, which is a basis to confirm the deaths of almost 300k people. The other document gives us insight into how many people died among the slave laborers. Neither document is an exhaustive list detailing everything- they are just secondary documents that verify or support specific events.

They did not

The claim is a lie

COMITE INTERNATIONAL DE LA CROIX-ROUGE

Geneva, 10 May 1979
Fpe/grt

Dear Madam,

We have pleasure in acknowledging receipt of your letter of 12 April concerning the victims of the Second World War, together with the enclosed booklet. We did already have a copy of this document, which is not the only one of its kind. Indeed, the ICRC and several National Societies, in particular, the American Red Cross, have received a great deal of correspondence on this matter.

The booklet in question supports its false allegations by two abridged quotations taken from two documents published by the ICRC:

"Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its activities dueing the Second World War" (3 volumes)

"The work of the ICRC for civilian detainees in German Concentration Camps" (1 volume)

These two documents, which we are sending you under separate cover, contain the basic information which the ICRC possesses on the victims of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, we are not able to provide you with the figures you are seeking, since the ICRC has never tried to compile statistics on the victims of the war and has never certified the accuracy of the statistics produced by a third party. In fact, the basic aim of the ICRC is to come to the aid of victims of armed conflicts and not to act as a commission of enquiry or a statistics service.

With regard to the figure of 300,000 victims quoted on page 28 of the document you sent us, on 19 January 1955 the newspaper "Die Tat" published an article (of which a photocopy is enclosed) giving figures for the victims of the Second World War, including that of 300,000.

As you will see upon reading this article, first, the figure of 300,000 was not given by the ICRC and, secondly, it refers only to the _German_ victims (Jews and non-Jews) of the concentration camps. The authors of the booklet have therefore doubly falsified their information, by claiming that the figure relates to all the Jewish deportation victims and by naming the ICRC as its source.

Finally, for your information, we are sending a copy of the ICRC information bulletin "The ICRC in Action" of 12 December 1975, the last page of which mentions the work of the ICRC in concentration camps.

We hope this information will be of use to you.

Yours faithfully,
s/
R. Gaillard-Moret
Head of Documentation and Dissemination

No, it is not an “established fact”, per se, but the result of a consensus born of an incredible amount of research. Since I have also answered a very similar question elsewhere on Quora, I am going to copy-and-paste that answer of mine here too. After all, people often toss around the number 6 million and we presume that this number comes from historical sources. The truth is, those sources are so complicated (and, by definition, so inaccessible) that few people know how the figure is even derived.

Essentially, there are two different techniques, both of which are employed by historians, and each of which yields a different total.

Adding

The first technique is that of adding. The Nazis kept meticulous records, held by various central agencies, like the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). If we add all of those figures together, we reach a total number of victims - at least in theory. There are, however, lots of problems with this method.

For a start, the statistics reflect three main causes of death, and the procedures for acquiring those numbers differ from one another. The first main cause of death is privation (mostly, but not exclusively, starvation and disease within ghettos). These records are accumulated by the heads of the Jewish Councils, who then have to report them to their Nazi supervisors. This means that records for this cause of death are very detailed in large ghettos like Warsaw and Lodz, but very sparse in smaller ghettos like Buczacz or Berehove.

The total figure for deaths by privation is probably in excess of 800,000.

The second main cause of death is that of shooting (what Patrick Desbois referred to as “Holocaust by bullets”). These statistics are acquired by SS and police units (particularly Einsatzgruppen) and are reported directly to the RSHA. They show a great attention to detail, but that attention is not consistent. They are extraordinarily detailed for the shootings in 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, but considerably less detailed in the shootings of 1942 and 1943. Not only that, but shootings of Jews by army units and by SS units in the rear are somewhat under-reported, and we have very little statistical information that concerns the number of people murdered on death marches at the end of the war.

The total figure for deaths by shooting is probably about 1.5 million. This does not include the number of people murdered on death marches, which we now estimate to be about 250,000.

The third main cause of death involves deportation to death camps. Numerically, this is the largest category, and again: numbers are very detailed. Note, however, that this detail pertains to the number of people being shipped off, but not to the number of people arriving at the camp. The only instances in which arrivals were documented was where they were selected to work (Auschwitz or Majdanek), or where they might be given a temporary reprieve from murder (Belzec, Treblinka, etc).

The total figure for deaths by industrial murder is probably about 3 million.

Based on the above, Adolf Eichman boasted to Wilhelm Hoettl in Budapest, 1944, that 6 million Jews had been murdered. Hoettl signed an affidavit to that effect in 1945, and it was on the strength of that affidavit that the 6 million figure was used at Nuremberg. Eichman later quoted a lower figure of 5 million, which he maintained at his trial in 1961.

Subtracting

The second technique is that of subtraction. Put bluntly, this involves taking census data pertaining to Jews at the end of the war and subtracting that figure from the census data that pertained to Jews before the war. Note that this technique also involves significant addition, since the pre- and post-war census data still need to be compiled.

Some of the complications involved in this technique relate to shifting borders. How does one tally the number of Jews in Poland before the war and after the war, when towns that once belonged to one country now belong to another? Some towns are notoriously difficult to assess, given the frequency with which they changed hands even before the war began. Obviously, one needs to be careful not to count the same people twice.

Another complication relates to assessing the nature of one’s death. Obviously, somebody who died because they had been ghettoised is a victim of the Holocaust, but can we be certain that a Jew who had lived in Warsaw before the war died in the Warsaw ghetto? To choose Poland as an example, census data tells us that there were slightly more than 3 million Jews living in pre-war Poland, making up approximately 30% of Warsaw itself. That’s a large enough community that we have to assume a certain number of deaths by natural causes even before the war begins (or, to be fair, after the war has started, but entirely unrelated to the Nazis).

Furthermore, but from the opposite perspective, we have no way of assessing the number of children born during the war and murdered during the Holocaust. From a wide range of testimony (including that of perpetrators), we know of the murder of babies. A significant proportion of those children were too young to have been born before the war started, but are not accounted for in this technique of computation.

Controversially, neither technique of computation allows for the number of late term pregnancies that were forcibly aborted, nor the number of newborn babies who were killed. We consider such people to have been victims of the Holocaust, but they are not accounted for by anybody’s tabulation. We also have a lot of difficulty assessing the precise number of people who are murdered by civilians either to settle a personal grudge or for pecuniary motives (a number that we have reason to believe was in the hundreds of thousands), and we don’t count people who were murdered after the war ended, or who perished from disease and malnutrition in Displaced Persons camps.

There are lots of question marks hanging over all of these calculations. Any technique for accumulating data that pertain to so large a number of people is always going to be fraught with complications, and it is not surprising that we should encounter such wide discrepancies. The late Raul Hilberg gives a very comprehensive description of tabulation (The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume III, pp1201ff), but arrives at a number far lower than what most historians today would estimate.

Hilberg’s total, arrived at in the 1950s, is between 5.1 and 5.3 million. To the best of my understanding, he maintained that approximation until his death in 2007.

Today, most scholars estimate a total between 5.7 and 5.9 million. We continue to use the number 6 million as shorthand, even though it is inexact.

What is important to understand is that while there is discrepancy, it is not resultant of exaggeration. Exaggeration implies an agenda. Most scholars of the Holocaust are not Jewish, their pursuit is apolitical, and their motivation is historiographical. If you limit yourself to English language recapitulations of historical scholarship (survey histories by people like Laurence Rees or Martin Gilbert, etc), then by definition you will encounter less information on the subject than you would if you actually delved into it in more detail.

Should you choose to truly delve, you will discover that there are hundreds of new articles published every year, dozens of monographs, and scores of new ideas. There is a tremendous amount of discussion and debate, and if consensus has developed it is because of the sheer number of people who are researching this subject meticulously, and the fact that there is now so very little that we don’t understand.

This is actually one of the valid holocaust debates going on. Holocaust deniers think they are involved in “debate” around the subject when in reality they are a joke to everyone except themselves.

How many died in the holocaust?

There are 2 positions to take here.

1. 6 million people, all Jews, died in the holocaust
2. 13–17 million people, including Jews, died in the holocaust

First, let’s look at non-Jewish deaths

• Massacres in Belarus: 1.6 million
• Polish citizens killed: 1.9 million
• About 500k were killed in concentration camps
• Soviet POWs killed: 3.5 million
• Disabled people killed: 300,000
• Roma people killed: 222,000
• Political prisoners: 50,000 - 100,000
• Homosexuals killed: 1,200
• Jehova’s witnesses killed: 1,400

So in total, 7.5 million.

Here is the problem- who do we include in the holocaust? Let me explain

There was only ever an effort to exterminate 2 populations- the Jews and the disabled.

Check out this speech given by Himmler in 1943

I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.

It is one of those things that is easily said. [quickly] “The Jewish people is being exterminated,”

every Party member will tell you “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.” [less quickly] And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. [mockingly] They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. [a few people laugh]

Or the Heydrich Directive sent out by one of the leaders of the SS

You see Germany made an effort to exterminate the Jews. They built special extermination camps and they sent out special units to hunt and exterminate every Jew that could be found.

Take Auschwitz. The non-Jews that arrived were mostly kept in the camp as labor. Meanwhile, 80% of the Jews that arrived were gassed and killed on the spot.

Or take the 5 other extermination camps which were built to kill only Jews.

Indeed Nazi Germany made a real effort to kill all the Jews and in many nations, 90% of the Jewish population was killed. It’s brutal.

Now Germany made no other effort with any other population (besides the disabled).

Other groups like Slavic people, Poles, homosexuals, or Roma were considered “subhuman” and they enjoyed no protection from Nazi brutality. Many wound up in concentration camps or were massacred by the German army.

Yet there was never any effort to kill all the Poles or kill all the Roma. The only 2 groups that the Nazis tried to exterminate were Jews and disabled persons.

In WW2 35 million civilians died as a result of Nazi actions. How many of those 35 million should be included?

In Japan during WW2 millions of Chinese people were slaughtered and the Japanese kept allied POWs in horrid camps where they starved to death. Yet this is not called genocide. These are called wartime atrocities and crimes against humanity but not genocide.

Is the death of a Soviet POW from starvation really a genocide? Is the massacre of civilians as revenge for resistance attacks really a genocide?

Most holocaust historians would argue that these killings were just brutal wartime atrocities committed by an evil Empire.

So where do we draw the line? If we are going to include Polish, Russian, and Slavic deaths in the holocaust why can’t we include all 35 million who died? Why not include British citizens killed in the Blitz or French citizens killed by the Nazis?

Maybe we just include those killed in concentration camps but this also makes little sense. Most camps were just labor camps and while the conditions in them were illegal (due to how horrid they were) the actual operation of prison camps in wartime is not a crime.

Maybe we just include those killed in extermination camps. Well, the extermination camps almost solely killed Jews and only Jews.

Do you see the problem?

The holocaust is not just an atrocity- it's a genocide. We can’t just include every brutal act of violence- we need the intent to exterminate.

Now I am of 2 minds on this.

I think that the Jews certainly were the most affected group (both overall and percentage-wise). That said I think there are some events that should be included like

1. The killings of the Roma people
2. The killings of disabled persons
3. Various massacres in the USSR and Poland

I think these were significant efforts to at least partially exterminate a population from a region.

That said if you want to argue that only the 6 million Jewish deaths should be counted as genocide, I don’t think you are wrong.

We could teach that the Nazis exterminated 6 million in genocide and killed another 30–35 million in various war crimes and acts of extreme violence.

It’s worth thinking about.

They did not do so. Its a Holocaust denial myth.

The Germans did set up a mechanism to generate death certificates for those sent to concentration camps. If was a bureaucracy needed for the family survivors. The Red Cross managed the programs. A total of 271,000 death certificates were issued. Most were not for Jews.

The vast majority of Jews killed were never part of the program, and were sent to death camps, not concentration camps. For obvious reasons, the Germans were not issuing death certicates for the Jews they murdered, and family members were not asking for them since they were also victims. Most of the Holocaust victims were not Germans anyway, and a death certificate would not be issued.

Hun­gar­i­an Jews were among the most accul­tur­at­ed of Euro­pean Jews, hav­ing been grant­ed cit­i­zen­ship and civ­il rights under the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. However, large seg­ments of Hun­gar­i­an soci­ety reject­ed Jews as inher­ent­ly alien and destruc­tive infe­ri­ors who under­mined the econ­o­my and iden­ti­ty of Hun­gary. Starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed a series of anti-Jewish measures in emulation of Germany's Nuremberg Laws. The "First Jewish Law" (May 29, 1938) restricted the number of Jews in each commercial enterprise, in the press, among physicians, engineers and lawyers to twenty percent. The "Second Jewish Law" (May 5, 1939), for the first time, defined Jews racially: individuals with two, three or four Jewish-born grandparents were declared Jewish. The "Third Jewish Law" (August 8, 1941) prohibited intermarriage and penalized sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. Their employment in government at any level was forbidden.

During World War II, Hungarian Jews were drafted into the Labor Service to perform forced labor as auxiliary troops to the Royal Hungarian Army. These units were an outgrowth of World War I units, when Jews served in the Hungarian armed forces. In World War II, however, Jews had been defined as unworthy of being regular soldiers. The badly fed and poorly clothed units were initially assigned to perform heavy construction works within Hungary. With Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Hungary sent most of these labor batallions to the Eastern Front. Sent to the front without weapons and subjected to grinding brutality at the hands of the officers and soldiers, some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. When the Hungarian defense lines at the river Don collapsed in early 1943, the Jewish laborers suffered enormous losses: 45,000 out of 50,000 men perished.

In 1944, Hungary still had a Jewish population of 825,000 (that comprised over eight percent of the population), the largest remaining in Europe. Fearing Hungary was trying to pursue a separate peace with the Allies, governor Horthy was forced by the Germans to appoint a far-right government. Under German instructions, the mass deportation of Jews commenced. In a period of just two months, between May and July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival. Just before the deportations of Jews from Budapest began, the Vrba–Wetzler report reached the Allies. The report provided a detailed description of the gas chambers, and what was happening inside the camp; it had been dictated to the Slovakian Jewish Council by two Auschwitz escapees. On the basis of the Vrba–Wetzler report, world leaders, including Pope Pius XII, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and King Gustaf V of Sweden, threatened Horthy to stop the deportations. By the time the deportations had stopped, almost the entire community of Jews in the Hungarian countryside had gone.

After Horthy was forced to resign and the Arrow Cross Party came to power in October 1944, ghettos were set up in Budapest. The great Budapest ghetto was walled just before the Soviet Red Army encircled the city. The Arrow Cross members shot 10,000–15,000 Jews on the banks of the Danube, before Soviet troops liberated the Budapest ghetto on 18 January 1945. From over 900,000 Jews living within Hungary's borders in 1941–1944, about 255,000 are thought to have survived.

This actually brings up an interesting (and disturbing) discussion about what happened from 1939–1945.

The holocaust is complex- really complex. There are few easy answers to any of this.

The whole thing went in ebbs and flows. Here is a graph of the total killed during the holocaust- notice how it peaks and valleys a lot

The red line is Auschwitz, the extermination camps, and the mobile killing squads combined.

1933–1939: The Jews are oppressed within Germany. Their net worth, bank account balance, and property ownership is restricted heavily.

• 300,000 disabled people are killed as well

1939–1941: With Poland conquered Polish and German Jews are sent to ghettos. When France and the other Western nations are conquered most are deported directly to various concentration camps.

1942–1943: This is the peak period. Polish Jews are sent from the ghettos to the extermination camps and Auschwitz. These extermination camps (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Majdanek) kill an estimated 2 million Jews in just a year.

• Starting in late 1941 but mostly in 42 and 43 the mobile killing squads begin to commit various massacres behind German lines in the USSR. As the Germans advance, the mobile killing squads massacre civilians in the rear. An estimated 1.5 million Jews are killed

1943–1944: The extermination camps are mostly shut down and demolished with a few remaining up as basic camps. Auschwitz remains in full use as 438,000 Hungarian Jews are deported to Auschwitz and never seen again.

• At this point Auschwitz is so large it is capable of meeting Nazi Germany’s extermination desires. With the large gas chambers and cremation capacity, they send more Jews there.

1944–1945: The war has turned against the Germans and they are trying to cover up what they did. Available manpower and resources are needed on the front line. Gassings mostly stop as Jews are used for slave labor primarily.

So that is how it happened. Now as you can see not every Jew died in concentration camps.

• Many were killed by mobile killing squads
• Many were executed in the ghettos

We can estimate that maybe 2.5 million Jews were just slaughtered in cold blood on the spot. An additional 1 million were gassed at Auschwitz and an additional 2 million were gassed at the extermination camps.

So why gas Jews instead of shooting them on the spot?

Well, have you ever tried to shoot somebody? They generally don’t like it very much.

Say 10,000 Jews arrive on a train. Do you know how hard it is to convince thousands of men to gun them down at point-blank? Do you know how many men that takes? Do you realize how hard it is to shoot 10,000 people? Also what if the people revolt and fight back, you may get mobbed and lose.

This is 100,000 people below. 60 times this many Jews were killed in the holocaust.

Gas chambers are super easy though. You tell afraid arrivals to enter the shower room and get clean. Once the thousands of them enter, you bolt the door, pour in gas, and wait 15 minutes. It takes a few guards, a guy to close the door, and a guy to pour in gas.

There is no chance of revolt either. It’s also highly efficient.

It is brutal, horrible, and totally logical.

I’ve done this one already but let’s do it 1 more time to be safe.

The Russians had been able to determine the peak operating capacity for Auschwitz. Through documents like the Bischoff Telegram, they could determine 4.7 bodies could be cremated a day. With this, they calculated that 4 million people COULD have been killed if everything ran at peak operational capacity for the camp's entire history.

As the Russians set up Auschwitz as a memorial, they put down a plague that cited “4 million” as the number killed.

Now there are some really important things to note

1. The Russians NEVER proved 4 million so no scholar ever cited 4 million as the number
2. The Russians themselves never even cited “4 million” as the number killed- instead citing 2 million in court trials
3. Real Holocaust Scholars determined the actual number to be closed to 1 million immediately. One of the first academic books on the Holocaust cited the number of those killed at Auschwitz as 1 million, and it was published in 1953. (Gerard Reitlinger's The Final Solution)

So when deniers say “historians said 4 million died in at Auschwitz when really 1 million died. They lied before they could be lying now” what they should be saying is “Russian propagandists calculated 4 million could have died at Auschwitz but no historians or scholars ever believed that estimate was accurate”

It’s very hard to know the exact number, for two reasons:

1: It wasn’t actually well documented how many Jews lived in Europe, and even the definition of “Jewish” can differ. Do you count only those who actually practice the religion? But the Nazis killed everyone they could find with Jewish ancestry, regardless of religion. In many places, religion wouldn’t even be entered in official records. In others, people had hidden their Jewishness for generations (by pretending to convert to Christianity) because practicing the religion was banned.

2: Most records were destroyed in the war anyway. A bomb dropped on an archive will do that. And some Polish priests burned all population records in the parish when the Nazis arrived, precisely so they would not be able to know who was Jewish; in other cases, retreating Nazis burned records to hide their crimes. And often, all you can say with any certainty is that someone was alive in 1939 and dead in 1945; it can never be completely certain whether they were killed in a concentration camp, fighting as soldiers on the frontlines, or killed as civilians by bombing.

In total, it is estimated that between 5 and 8 million Jews perished by being systematically murdered by the Nazis. Most estimates land close to 6 million, and that’s why that number is often quoted. Not all of them died in the camps; many were simply killed with machine guns in especially Ukrainian and Russian villages and towns as soon as the Nazis arrived – they had special teams, the Einsatzgruppen, who went around just behind the front and murdered every Jew they could find.

It is also estimated that 5 to 6 million non-Jews were murdered, primarily in the camps. The figure does not include prisoners of war. As a percentage of the population, it is likely that the Roma were even harder hit than the Jews, but records are very patchy and their total numbers were lower.

Pictured below are 30 Jewish women who were forced to march on foot to a new concentration camp deeper in Germany as the Allies pushed in. In that -4 degree weather with no shoes. clothing, or food, they starved to death.

FYI none of the pictures here are going to make you feel good. I pull no punches here.

In one such “death march” the SS was moving some 4,000 prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora deeper into Germany- specifically to Bergen Concentration Camp. They arrived at Gardelegen which was a town with a train station planning to pack the prisoners into said trains and send them away. The problem was that the train could not operate due to damage from Allied bombing.

The SS realized prisoners badly outnumbered them and recruited everyone from firefighters to Hitler Youth to help. It was then decided that 1,000 of the weakest and sickest would be killed. These men were brought into a barn where many were shot. Most however were locked into said barn as it was set on fire.

By accident, an American Officer named Emerson Hunt was captured by the local Nazis. He convinced them that an entire Armored Division was right behind him and so the Nazis surrendered. By the time US forces did arrive a short time later they discovered the atrocity before the SS had time to bury the bodies and cover up their crime.

1,000 innocent people- farmers, blacksmiths, bank tellers, store owners- burned alive.

This photograph is titled “The Last Jew in Vinnytsia”. It was taken by a German soldier sometime around July 1941. This man likely watched his wife, children, parents, and friends all get massacred. You can see it in his face- not terror or sadness- just resignation and shock. He was not some soldier or criminal, he was just a normal man.

Imagine tomorrow morning you are woken up by men with guns shouting and screaming at you. They drag you and your family outside and force you and your family to dig a grave. Then you watch your family be massacred. All of this is because you are considered sub-human for no reason.

Or imagine you are in a gas chamber with your entire family and community. Here are the words of one of the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoriums.

You see, once the gas was poured in, it worked like this: it rose from the ground upwards. And in the terrible struggle that followed – because it was a struggle – the lights were switched off in the gas chambers. It was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realized that the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better. That caused the struggle.

Secondly, most people tried to push their way to the door. It was psychological – they knew where the door was, and maybe they could force their way out. It was instinctive, a death struggle.

Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, always wound up at the bottom. The strongest were on top. Because in the death struggle, a father didn’t realize his son lay beneath him”.

-Filip Muller, Sonderkommando Auschwitz II

The photos of the bodies are endless. Great mounds of corpses from people who the Nazis killed. Millions and millions of people all of whom were innocent civilians who wanted to live their lives.

If you think these people “deserved it” then you are wrong. I don’t mean wrong like 2+2 = 5, I mean wrong like Epstein was wrong- like Jeffrey Dahmer was wrong. People who think this was deserved are morally repugnant, insecure, and evil to their core.

1: Well “the Jews” are doing it now!

This is the take of someone with what the internet calls a “smooth brain”.

• Most Holocaust victims ARE DEAD. This includes those few who survived this terror. A person who was just 20 when the Holocaust ended (14 when it began) would be 100 years old. The few remaining survivors are not in positions of authority or fighting in this conflict.
• A European Jewish person did not live in Israel nor have a connection to it as Israel was not established. Israel is also 21% Arab which is an undeniable fact. You can criticize Israel as strongly as you’d like but it has no bearing on the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was the genocide of Jews, Romani, LGTBQ, and disabled persons during WW2 in Europe. It has no bearing on the modern conflict in Gaza. This would be like saying that the victims of 9/11 deserved it because of slavery. It is not even dumb- it is worse than that.

2: The Jews “started it” with Germany

Holocaust deniers love to lie. So let’s be clear on what happened with this stupid myth.

1. The Germans passed insanely antisemitic laws after Hitler came to power. Jews were barred from working in the government, attending school, having a certain amount of money, owning newspapers, and so on. This dehumanization goes on and on until Jews are in extermination camps being gassed
2. Internationally Jewish people boycotted German goods in protest of these laws. The boycotts came AFTER the laws were passed.
3. Jewish peasants or business owners didn’t control the UK, Poland, or Germany. They did not start WW2, they did not “attack Germany”- they are blameless victims

The 6 million is a good estimate.

It is divided by:

• Operation Reinhard, the annihilation of the Polish Jews in the six extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Sóbibor, Majdanek) 1942–1944. The Deutsche Reichsbahn cargo books indicate some 3.2 million Jews hauled to the extermination camps. Note that Auschwitz was a triple camp (Stammlager, Birkenau and Monowitz) of which Stammlager and Monowitz were slave labour camps and many captives were hauled to slave work instead, so the actual number is likely to be lower, perhaps 2.7 million.
• The Einsatzgruppen at the occupied areas. They murdered approximately 1.9 million Jews, usually by mass shootings, hangings, and similar crude methods in more than 1,500 cities, towns, and villages across occupied eastern Europe and USSR. The number is obtained from census numbers after the war by deducting the Operation Reinhard victims from the dead.
• The various slave labour camps. The idea was simply to squeeze the inmates out of nutrition and calories and kill them by work. Some 800,000 to 1 million Jews have died in the slave labour camps - usually from diseases, abuse and starvation. The largest of the slave labour camps was Auschwitz I Stammlager. This number overlaps with the Operation Reinhard to some extent as Auschwitz II Birkenau was an extermination camp, and the captives hauled to either is not easily observed in the Reichsbahn cargo books. Anne Frank is one of the most famous victims in this category - she died at Bergen-Belsen.
• The various riots, pogroms and uprisings. Some 300,000 Jews have been estimated to be killed in the violent events. This includes those which Germans and their allies and collaborators killed Jewish people in acts of violence and deprivation that took place outside of sites of detention (camps and ghettos).

The majority of the murders happened in the Occupied Poland. Here a map of the extermination camps, slave labour camps and ghettos.

The very same thing which Finland learned from the Winter War and which every nerd should learn in the comprehensive school.

1. This world is an evil place. Take all threats seriously, especially those made by a Totalitarian regime.
2. The only one you can rely on is you yourself.
3. Arm yourself or at least learn martial arts and get military training. If you are neutral, you are everyone’s potential enemy.
4. Nukes are your best friend. Nobody fscks with a country with nukes. I sincerely hope Finland will join Israel in the nuclear club.
5. No matter how much you pray or how frum you are, God won’t help you. Do the other guy first before he does it to you.
6. Authorities are useless. Teachers are useless at school; United Nations is useless in international scheme.

This is a great question. How many Jews did die during the Holocaust?

People often toss around the number 6 million, and we presume that this number comes from historical sources. The truth is, those sources are so complicated (and, by definition, so inaccessible) that few people know how the figure is even derived.

Essentially, there are two different techniques, both of which are employed by historians, and each of which yields a different total.

Adding

The first technique is that of adding. The Nazis kept meticulous records, held by various central agencies, like the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). If we add all of those figures together, we reach a total number of victims - at least in theory. There are, however, lots of problems with this method.

For a start, the statistics reflect three main causes of death, and the procedures for acquiring those numbers differ from one another. The first main cause of death is privation (mostly, but not exclusively, starvation and disease within ghettos). These records are accumulated by the heads of the Jewish Councils, who then have to report them to their Nazi supervisors. This means that records for this cause of death are very detailed in large ghettos like Warsaw and Lodz, but very sparse in smaller ghettos like Buczacz or Berehove.

The total figure for deaths by privation is probably in excess of 800,000.

The second main cause of death is that of shooting (what Patrick Desbois referred to as “Holocaust by bullets”). These statistics are acquired by SS and police units (particularly Einsatzgruppen) and are reported directly to the RSHA. They show a great attention to detail, but that attention is not consistent. They are extraordinarily detailed for the shootings in 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, but considerably less detailed in the shootings of 1942 and 1943. Not only that, but shootings of Jews by army units and by SS units in the rear are somewhat under-reported, and we have very little statistical information that concerns the number of people murdered on death marches at the end of the war.

The total figure for deaths by shooting is probably about 1.5 million. This does not include the number of people murdered on death marches, which we now estimate to be about 250,000.

The third main cause of death involves deportation to death camps. Numerically, this is the largest category, and again: numbers are very detailed. Note, however, that this detail pertains to the number of people being shipped off, but not to the number of people arriving at the camp. The only instances in which arrivals were documented was where they were selected to work (Auschwitz or Majdanek), or where they might be given a temporary reprieve from murder (Belzec, Treblinka, etc).

The total figure for deaths by industrial murder is probably about 3 million.

Based on the above, Adolf Eichman boasted to Wilhelm Hoettl in Budapest, 1944, that 6 million Jews had been murdered. Hoettl signed an affidavit to that effect in 1945, and it was on the strength of that affidavit that the 6 million figure was used at Nuremberg. Eichman later quoted a lower figure of 5 million, which he maintained at his trial in 1961.

Subtracting

The second technique is that of subtraction. Put bluntly, this involves taking census data pertaining to Jews at the end of the war and subtracting that figure from the census data that pertained to Jews before the war. Note that this technique also involves significant addition, since the pre- and post-war census data still need to be compiled.

Some of the complications involved in this technique relate to shifting borders. How does one tally the number of Jews in Poland before the war and after the war, when towns that once belonged to one country now belong to another? Some towns are notoriously difficult to assess, given the frequency with which they changed hands even before the war began. Obviously, one needs to be careful not to count the same people twice.

Another complication relates to assessing the nature of one’s death. Obviously, somebody who died because they had been ghettoised is a victim of the Holocaust, but can we be certain that a Jew who had lived in Warsaw before the war died in the Warsaw ghetto? To choose Poland as an example, census data tells us that there were slightly more than 3 million Jews living in pre-war Poland, making up approximately 30% of Warsaw itself. That’s a large enough community that we have to assume a certain number of deaths by natural causes even before the war begins (or, to be fair, after the war has started, but entirely unrelated to the Nazis).

Furthermore, but from the opposite perspective, we have no way of assessing the number of children born during the war and murdered during the Holocaust. From a wide range of testimony (including that of perpetrators), we know of the murder of babies. A significant proportion of those children were too young to have been born before the war started, but are not accounted for in this technique of computation.

Controversially, neither technique of computation allows for the number of late term pregnancies that were forcibly aborted, nor the number of newborn babies who were killed. We consider such people to have been victims of the Holocaust, but they are not accounted for by anybody’s tabulation. We also have a lot of difficulty assessing the precise number of people who are murdered by civilians either to settle a personal grudge or for pecuniary motives (a number that we have reason to believe was in the hundreds of thousands), and we don’t count people who were murdered after the war ended, or who perished from disease and malnutrition in Displaced Persons camps.

There are lots of question marks hanging over all of these calculations. Any technique for accumulating data that pertain to so large a number of people is always going to be fraught with complications, and it is not surprising that we should encounter such wide discrepancies. The late Raul Hilberg gives a very comprehensive description of tabulation (The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume III, pp1201ff), but arrives at a number far lower than what most historians today would estimate.

Hilberg’s total, arrived at in the 1950s, is between 5.1 and 5.3 million. To the best of my understanding, he maintained that approximation until his death in 2007.

Today, most scholars estimate a total between 5.7 and 5.9 million. We continue to use the number 6 million as shorthand, even though it is inexact.

What is important to understand is that while there is discrepancy, it is not resultant of exaggeration. Exaggeration implies an agenda. Most scholars of the Holocaust are not Jewish, their pursuit is apolitical, and their motivation is historiographical. If you limit yourself to English language recapitulations of historical scholarship (survey histories by people like Laurence Rees or Martin Gilbert, etc), then by definition you will encounter less information on the subject than you would if you actually delved into it in more detail.

Should you choose to truly delve, you will discover that there are hundreds of new articles published every year, dozens of monographs, and scores of new ideas. There is a tremendous amount of discussion and debate, and if consensus has developed it is because of the sheer number of people who are researching this subject meticulously, and the fact that there is now so very little that we don’t understand.

Is it an established fact that Nazis killed 6 million Jews?

Contrary to the venerable Alex Mann, I assert no.

Why? Because when faced with such a claim, it’s best to confront the incredibly bad faith which underlies it.

So no. It is not an established fact that the “Nazis killed 6 million Jews.”

…

But it’s probably really damn close to the truth. And the whole truth is probably much worse.

All facts can and should be questioned. But many people asking this specific question aren’t genuinely questioning the truth of the statement.

It is common, online, for Holocaust deniers to argue things like, “It’s never been proven that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.”

I’m not sure what should be emphasized in there. We know that it was proven at the International Military Tribunal (and the numerous trials that followed over decades) that the Nazis, in fact, killed many Jews. Millions.

You can, today, watch the recorded videos of these proceedings.

Were the proceedings somehow procedurally tainted? Did any of the 24 major defendants dispute the truth of the charges leveled against them? Did they dispute their own orders, written by their own hand?

To my recollection, not one person disputed the substantial truth of the big picture: that the Nazi regime intentionally planned to kill a lot of Jews—and they actually did it.

The Nazis did it. They knew they did it. They knew everyone else knew they did it. When their lives were on the line, they didn’t bother trying to deny it.

So, unless you wish to claim something bat-shit insane—like the proceedings were filmed on a Hollywood sounds stage, featuring crisis actors and Nazi look-alikes—then what is it that you are disputing?

That the exact number was not proven? That the number must be exactly 6 million? Not 5,999,999 and not 6,000,001?

Well fine. Then you’re not really arguing that the Nazis were not mass-murderers. You’re just disagreeing about the extent of the depraved horrors they perpetrated.

Most people of reasonable intelligence understand what someone means when they say that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. They wouldn’t bat an eye if the actual number were 5,999,999 Jews. Or if it were 6,000,001 Jews.

Adults understand that estimates about large numbers are not precise. It’s not possible to give an exact number. And no reasonable person can expect a historian to produce an exact, forensic accounting of exactly 6 million murders over half a decade, each with documentary evidence showing their Jewish ancestry.

We know that’s impossible: the Nazis destroyed much of the direct evidence. Literally, burning many of the bodies. To conceal the absolute horror of their national socialist regime. And, well, to speed up the process.

When you’re dealing with numbers this large, 100,000 people here and there… cold-heartedly, you’re just talking about a medium city here or there. The Jewish murders were intended to destroy an entire nation of people.

European history from the late 1930s to mid-1940s is filled with missing people. Still, you can’t say, with certainty, where any one person went. That’s often why they were missing. But if someone was Jewish, living in certain areas of Poland, Germany, etc., and known to be in an area where Jews were herded into box cars, marched to the death camps, the mobile death squads had recently visited…and then that person’s name forever disappears from history?

You don’t have to be a Nazi rocket scientist to figure that one out.

Yes, we might say that the person’s fate is ultimately unknown. Maybe someone escaped to America or England or Sweden or Japan or Russia or who knows where—and took up an assumed name and never spoke of it again. There are a small number of cases where that happened.

But there’s a fairly high probability that the person was just another numbered victim of the Nazi regime. Records were kept, but some names are now just lost to history. It’s hard to say. There were so many.

Piles of eyeglasses from victims, 1939.

The scope of death is mind-numbing. For U.S. citizens, it is as if roughly the entire populations of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were reduced to ZERO in a span of about 5 years. Because every person—man, woman, child—was either shot in the head, gassed, starved, or died from disease or exposure.

Still, the Nazis kept fairly good written records. They were notoriously good at record keeping. So, it’s not hard to corroborate an absolutely massive number of murders from the Nazis own records. But—as with any record-keeping system—there is some bad data in there too. That’s unavoidable.

Several estimates have been produced by various sources, considering different sources of data and error in that data. The numbers seem to roughly range between 5–6 million Jews.

Mind you, the total number of deaths for which the Nazis were responsible is closer to 60 million.

And as noted below, the Nazis killed about 6 million Jews. But the Nazis also caused the deaths—directly and indirectly—of about 6 million Germans.

Is it an established fact that Nazis killed 6 million Jews?

• It is a fact, established beyond reasonable doubt, that the Nazis orchestrated a program of politically motivated ethnic cleansing, which resulted in large numbers of people, especially Jews, being murdered.
• It is a fair, informed estimate that the number of Jews that the Nazis murdered is around 6 million people. Give or take or couple small cities-worth of people.
• It is a fact, established beyond reasonable doubt, the the total number of people the Nazis killed is much-much larger.

Being grandson to holocaust survivors who eventually managed to escape Austria, I feel nothing towards Germany/Austria. My Grandmother hated Germany and Austria till her last day, her native language was German and her childhood memories were linked with that- it changed nothing for her. I feel her choice was natural and just. I know that people here would like to hear on how much it’s in the past, how much Germany today is different, and how German Jews (which are not ethnic Germans, but Semites, sometimes people actually need someone to tell them that) feel completely Germans (while we are not Germans but Jews..). Well, I can’t understand those who think we should put it in the past and certainly not those who put it in the past (though people are complex). First, not much time has passed. Many of those who were in Hitler’s youth are still alive today, some of those who murdered Jews in the camps are still alive. Austria is still almost openly antisemitic, they took huge part in the holocaust. Hitler was Austrian, Austrian members in the SS were over-represented relative to their percentage in the Reich population. Still, the Austrians are not directly blamed for the holocaust so they allowed themselves to elect president who was Nazi criminal of war , they avoided giving back Jews their property (refusing for instance to return Klimt masterpiece to Jewish heirs) and my teacher through high-school years, Jew whose parents are from Germany herself, told us how when she visited in Austria and asked to buy something in the duty free, the Austrian shopper saw she have Israeli passport, astonishingly asked her “Israel? Juden?” when she replied “ya” the shopper refused to give her service. Second, trying to kill all of your people, killing over on third and leaving many others damaged - is not something you put in the past. The Germans tried to kill me as well, though I wasn’t born yet. Everyone who identifies himself with the German culture is guilty.

I also think all these memory sites the Germans built and building means nothing about how the average German actually feel. It tells only about that they try to build new image and to look nice on the outside. And they were very successful with that. In fact, the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany that the government in the young state of Israel was thinking it had no choice but to sign (it needed the money to keep going back then in the early 50s) is considered by many historians as an agreement that lifted the badge of shame and turned Germany into kind of holly sinner. Historians point out, well many of them, that if not this agreement, Germany couldn’t became the financial power that it’s now, as it would continue to be an outcast for many years. Just as a footnote, this agreement was signed as total compensation for everything: Misery, killing, forced labor, physical damage, psychological damage, lost of income and looting Jewish property. By all accounts it didn’t cover till now for even half or third of the property that was stolen from the Jews by Germany, let alone blood, tortures and endless ways of persecutions …

But the “Funny” thing is that: Germany wasn’t allowed to pay pensions and etc to German citizens who formerly served in the SS. Why? Because according to international law, every one who served in the SS is considered war criminal. Even if he was not trialed. As the very most of them were not trialed. So how did Germany solve this problem? It paid full pension, double the amount that average holocaust survivor get for his family being murdered (and most holocaust survivors lost all or nearly all of their family, and Jews in Europe had big families) and he/she been tortured and persecuted, looted, etc, to the sons and grandsons of the people who served in the SS. Till today.

Surveys in Germany show that at least 20% of the Germans declaring themselves anti-Semites. One famous survey found 25% and another 30%. So being anti-Semic in Germany is just an opinion, not a big deal. I’m not talking about who knows how many more are anti-Semites but wouldn’t tell it in a survey.

Up until today, when German authorities are being asked to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, they mostly do everything they can to evade it and if they do trial them, then they usually end with funny sentences. Insult for the victims. For instance, Bruno Begerwas sentenced in 1974 for 3 years in prison. Why? He was deeply involved in the murder of over hundred Jewish concentration camp prisoners for his racial skeleton studies. However, though he was convicted and there was official (less than ridiculous) sentence, he spent 0 days in prison and died peacefully in Germany on 2009.

Germany today have nationalist movements like Pegida. 25 years ago German companies were doing huge deals with Saddam Hussien, selling him weapons of mass destruction and participating in his nuclear program. While he openly and repeatedly promised to destroy Israel. Germany as a state today is trying to influence Israel’s internal issues via proxies (or helping Israel’s sworn enemies - here), all over the years Germany had deals in billions with Israel worst enemies. For instance, SIEMENS, the famous German company that was built on the forced labor (many times until death) of 100,000 Jews during WWII, had deals in billions for building Iran its nuclear reactors. Other huge German companies, like one which designed and built the gas chambers where millions of Jews been slaughtered still exist and had the same deals. That couldn’t happen without the approval of German authorities.

Nearly 40% of the German people voted for the Nazi party on 1933. On 1939 its support among German population was well above 90%. Germany was anti-Semitic to the core. It had more than 1000 years of anti-Semitisim and persecutions of Jews (for instance, up until the 19 CE Jews were not allowed to enter German cities and had to pay special tax; they were murdered in hundreds of thousands during the German crusades; or the Hep-Hep riots that are considered by at least several important historians of the time as the first racially based persecutions of Jews in Germany on racial basis). 10 million Germans served in the Wehrmacht, additionally ~2 million served in the SS. Everybody in Germany knew someone who served in the German army or in the SS. In the Wehrmacht itself, basically everyone knew about the mass murder of Jews and many even participated in it. Citizens of countries taken by the Germans in WWII knew very well what happen to the Jews. There are endless testimonies of non Jewish people that live then, everybody knew. Now, this Wehrmacht soldiers returned home and they told. All Germany knew how Jews been bitten in the streets, how suddenly from 600,000 Jews living in Germany not even one is left. Arguing that the German people knew nothing or very little is bullshit, an insult for intelligence. How many of them resisted to the regime? Very few brave and moral people - like these members of the White Rose underground. But the very most of Germans were fully for the policy against Jews, and in any other European nation, even-though anti-Semitism was widely spread, u could find much more people who risked their life to save Jews. Germans were Hitler's Willing Executioners. From the time of slavery through the abolition of it and until the time people of color got equal rights in the US there was a gradual process of moral development. Germany never had been through such process, it was just defeated in war, that’s it. Today in Germany it’s pretty common to talk about “The Nazis” as like if it was ghost or external force that kidnapped German consciousness and not a natural development of their anti-Semitic and force and order worshiping culture. Many German films and books see Germans as the real victims of WWII (e.g., you can read here) and put in the center the suffering of Germans in this war, a war they started happily and willingly without any good reason but their will then for world dominance and to establish their imaginary racial supremacy. This is another insult for both moral and intelligence.

So, overall, I have no positive feeling about Germany. And I don’t think that new image make them into moral people.

I remember having a kid ask this question when I was in high school.

The teacher thought long and hard before he answered knowing that the answer had the potential to scar a kid's psyche.He plowed forward.

I'm glad he did.

He asked the class who in the classroom could shoot and kill, up close and personal, someone they didn't know. They're totally unarmed and helpless. The kids tried to add some mitigating conditions like if they'd killed a loved one, but the teacher batted all that aside. You don't know them.

Children too. You need to do this eight hours a day, every day.

The class got really quiet. The teacher asked, “do you get it now? People do not really like killing other people.” He explained how the Nazis had to sanitize the process to make it barely acceptable.

It was even more horrible than we are able to comprehend.

Even Nazis couldn't do it.

EDIT: Several comments have spoken about other war atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking and other conflicts as being proof that folks can easily kill civilians.

I wish to make a clear distinction between events that happen during the “Fog of War" when a soldier is part of a group and attacks what they're told are a group of “bad guys.” EVEN THEN, many of those folks get severe PTSD and take their own lives after it's all over. What I'm talking about in my answer is basically putting a gun to the back of a little kid's head and pulling the trigger day after day after day. Very few people could grab their morning cup of coffee, head over to the mass grave and start blowing people away.

Regular folks can be convinced to kill if they perceive they or their comrades are in danger, and even then, many Vietnam vets came home addicted to heroin because they needed that to be able to do the deeds they did.

The TLDR is 5.5 to 6 million. My own studies reveal a number closer to 6.2 million murdered. There were 16.6 million Jewish people alive in 1939. By the time a census could be done in 1947 by various Jewish organizations, 11 million Jewish people were remaining on earth.

• This is a simplification mind you. If anyone wants a detailed dive into census data and other information let me know. It is indeed a part of a larger project I am working on (more on that way below)

In essence, 5.5–6 million Jewish people vanished during WW2. Jewish populations in the US, Asia, and South America flourished and grew yet it was solely European Jews who were targeted. In all almost 67% of European Jews were killed. For context, the nation with the highest death rate (as a percentage of the population) was the Poles at 17%. The USSR, with all the famous deaths we know about, lost 13% of its population.

BE AWARE I PULL NO PUNCHES- THESE ARE NOT FUN IMAGES ARE TOPICS BELOW. DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

The cause: According to Hitler the “Jews” had “backstabbed” Germany and caused the defeat of the nation in WW1 (this is plainly false). Despite this being false Hitler LOVED antisemitic conspiracies and viewed Jews as the enemy of humankind. He viewed them as sub-human leeches but he viewed many groups that way. He also viewed Jewish people as dangerous saboteurs who would hamper the German war effort. Above all, Hitler believed in the stupid conspiracy that the “Jews were behind communism”. This crackpot theory is known as “Judeo Bolshevism”. To Hitler, the Slavic people were brainless puppets with inferior genes controlled by Jews. You can imagine how this INTENSE dehumanization led to insane death tolls.

Below is a common post that says “Who rules Moscow?”

• The point is that Hitler viewed the Jews as a global cabal of evil “leeches” feeding off people and giving nothing back. He thought this of the UK, the US, and France as well who were controlled by “Jewish finance”.

This is to illustrate the great depth of this conflict. The Germans cast themselves as innocent victims- put upon by the “Jewish” treaty of Versailles. To the Germans, this was a war between peoples and involved the SS, Gestapo, Army, Airforce, and even Navy. It was a national undertaking spanning years and some 50,000 people as staff/guards.

See below here. The Germans liked to use “terror bombing” to target civilians via bombing raids and ideally, inflict enough “terror” to end the war. This is a map of Warsaw for German bomber pilots- note how it specifically highlights portions of Warsaw that had a large Jewish population for targeting.

The Holocaust was not just barbed wire and camps. It was a national effort to eradicate innocent Jewish people from every nation via bullets, bombs, gas, disease, experimentation, overwork, malnutrition, or famine. It was a national goal and it ultimately succeeded to some degree.

You can break the Holocaust down into periods based on what was happening. There is some overlap. For instance, while killing operations began in the USSR the ghettos remained standing way behind the lines back in occupied Poland.

Period 1: September 1939 to January 1942
The Ghettos: 200k-300k killed.

Once Poland was about conquered Reinhard Heydrich, the mind behind the Holocaust, sent out the following order. From this date (September 1939) to

Jews from all over Poland (and a few other regions) were confined to ghettos. This mostly targeted Polish Jews as Jewish persons still in Germany were more often sent to labor camps at this point.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced into walled-off sections of a city. The goal was to “control” them and this gets back to the motivation of the Holocaust. Regardless in these walled-off severely overcrowded sections of cities, many Jewish people died from acts of violence perpetrated by the Germans or merely from starvation. Some 92,000 of the 400,000 in Warsaw died inside the Ghetto from the above-stated causes. Below is the outline of the Warsaw ghetto where 400,000 Jewish people were crammed in intolerable conditions for years.

Again this ties into the case. The Germans believed that “the Jews were the enemy of the people” so rounding them up into controlled areas where they could not leave would limit the “insidious” impact Hitler had in his wild sadistic imagination.

Period 2: June 1941 to January 1942
The Einsatzgruppen: 1.8 million killed.

When Germany invaded the USSR it was seen as an attack against “European Jewry”. As stated above Hitler viewed the Slavic people as slaves to “the Jews” and thus an attack against Slavs is an attack against the ultimate enemy.

Following the Wehrmacht advance was the SS Einsazgruppe. This SS “Task Force” had 1 main goal, to kill Jewish people. Indeed they were to operate behind the lines fighting partisans, resistance groups, and Jewish people. On July 8th Heydrich himself (one of the heads of the SS) ordered that Jews all “to be treated as Partisans”. This meant all Jewish men from ages 15–45 were legitimate targets for murder.

Unlike Partisans Jewish people were farmers, tradesmen, businesspeople, and everything else. They did not have guns and could rarely fight back so they were a much easier target. Thus they were killed more than any other group.

Meanwhile, Germany’s best ally, Romania, was already hard at work killing Romanian Jewish people. The Dictator of Romania, Ion Antonescu, was a rabid antisemite and sociopath on par with Hitler. Some 400,000 Jews were killed- often more excessively than in Germany.

"As far as the Jewish Question is concerned, it can now be stated with certainty that a man like Antonescu is pursuing much more radical policies in this area than we have so far."

• Adolf Hitler, August 1941

Thus in August of 1941, Heydrich extended the order to include all Jewish persons regardless of age. Going forward every Jewish person from a newborn baby to a 90-year-old woman was to be targeted.

These units operated behind the frontlines in coordination with each major Army group involved in the invasion of the USSR. Additionally, some units operated behind the lines in Poland. Pictured below are units of the Einsatzgruppen carrying off Jewish women and executing them.

Specifically, this was done by the “Order Police” who acted under the orders of and in conjunction with the Einsatzgruppen and SS overall.

Massacres were carried out all over Eastern Europe for about a year. Some were large, some were small. Here is a map covering just a selection of the massacre sites and mass graves.

We know so much about this because the Einsatzgruppen sent back reports on the number of Jews they killed and when/where they did so. These reports are preserved today and are known as the OSR reports. Pictured below is the “Jager report”, one of the OSR reports detailing operations in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The report details the murder of 136,421 Jews. This is also merely details 1 unit among 35.

Period 3: January 1942 to January 1944
The Camps: 2.5 million to 3 million killed.

Himmler himself visited the Einsatzgruppen and found the morale was low and drinking was common. No matter the commitment of these die-hard Nazi loyalists, spending day after day gunning down rural common people including children and women had an effect. Here below a teenage boy looks upon his parents and siblings- all slaughtered. He would be murdered seconds later and his final moments on this earth were not good.

The photo is from Zboriv, Ukraine in 1941. One massacre amidst a great many.

Now we get to the infamous January 1942 Wannsee Conference. This conference brought together Eichmann, Heydrich, and other powerful officials to discuss and plan “the final solution to the Jewish question”. There they set the plans that would come to define the Holocaust in popular understanding.

1. The Einsatzgruppen would be issued gas vans and focus more on partisans
2. The overcrowded ghettos would be “liquidated” to small extermination camps. These camps would use gas chambers. At first, it would be severe- taking the majority of the population of the ghettos in a few months.
3. Other Jews would be sent to alright built Auschwitz II with its 4 new gas chambers (many still under construction). This camp due to its location and size would become the main camp for extermination and labor as things changed.
4. The few who left the ghetto would remain as slave labor for needs within the urban area

The motivation was “the FINAL solution to the Jewish question”. Again we get back to this insane Nazi idea that “Jews are evil conspiratorial saboteurs”. Hitler believed this would rid him of saboteurs, Marxists, and “genetically inferior leeches”.

It is worth mentioning that poor harvests in 1940 and 1941 caused a slight food shortage. Germany had imported workers from all over Europe to try to keep their military running and needed to feed them. The influx of workers (paid, and volunteer workers) plus the inability to import much food made the situation serious. On a very sick and statistical level (a level men like Hitler and Stalin would understand) it made sense. This is PART of the reason prisoners were underfed.

Remember soldiers ate fine for almost the entire war as did workers within Germany. It was only those in camps deprived of food and it was because the INTENT was to kill them slowly, after extracting labor from them. When one got too sick or injured, they’d be sent to the gas chamber and replaced by a new worker come the next shipment of Jews. If a worker was too malnourished to continue, he too would be “selected” for the gas chamber and replaced. It was a sickening game of musical chairs.

In March 1942 Operation Reinhard kicked off. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from the major ghettos to “special camps” where they were to be “relocated to the East”. The Germans almost always used coded language for “killing”. Some common ones included “guided through the camp”, “special treatment”, or “transported East”. Some 2 million Jews would die in this lone operation that lasted about a year.

Over the coming months, hundreds of thousands became millions.

• Treblinka: 900,000 killed (based on reporting from station master Franciszek Ząbecki)
• Belzec: 600,000 killed
• Auschwitz: 600,000 killed
• Another “peak” of killing would occur later in 1944 when Hungary was annexed and Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
• Sobibor: 200,000 killed
• Chelmno: 200,000 killed

These were the main extermination camps but thousands of concentration camps existed. There people were sent to work on next to no food, in squalid disease-ridden conditions, and often to death. Another 500,000 at least died in various camps like Flossenbürg or Buchenwald.

These camps were meant for Jews, political prisoners, a dozens of other targetted groups. The goal here was to support the German war economy while “eliminating” more of the “genetically inferior”.

Period 4: July 1943 to April 1945
The Ending: 500k to 1 million killed.

In July of 1943 Himmler issued an order for every ghetto to be “liquidated” and that Jewish people not needed for labor be “resettled to the East”. This marked the end of Ghettos which had become more lightly populated concentration camps with the small remaining populations there.

With the final persons in the ghetto being flooded into the remaining work camps or resettled to the East many died- which was covered in the above section.

In March 1944 Hungary was occupied by Germany. The longtime ally of the Third Reich had been waffling in the face of defeat and so Hitler ordered the annexation of the nation. With that came some 800,000 Hungarian Jews who had been left mostly untouched.

In total, some 437,000 Jews were deported in 147 trains to Auschwitz with around 80% being gassed and killed upon arrival. As the Germans lost more and more ground in the East they began to “evacuate” the camps. These are the infamous death marches where another 50k to 100k died.

Then you have to factor in late-war typhus epidemics in the camp and malnutrition made worse by the worsening German logistics. To be clear Germany was still fighting the war and supplying its troops. It could have supplied these camps it just chose not to and to proitorize others. I don’t blame Germany for Typhus but I do blame them for putting these people into camps where they could get Typhus and to have such horrid conditions where typhus could break out.

In total, we have 5.1 to 6.1 million murders recorded above. The reason for this is that this is a pretty concise overview of what happened. The more authoritative and complete work on Auschwitz is 2000 pages long and uses tens of thousands of sources. Such is the complexity and detail at play.

I missed other operations, war crimes by the Wehrmacht, deaths at countless other camps, deaths in uprisings, and so on. I also could have gone into more detail in numerous places, deaths by the USSR, and so on. I aim to go through each action and event and find a specific number based on my research and more importantly, the research of world-renowned Holocaust scholars to do a long paper on it- not here though (see below)

• This project once done will have research papers, documents, etc. A long answer proves that 6 million Jews died. Likely due to how Quora works this will be on Substa(finish it). It’s in the BIOmetrics of my profile- the first one.
• Note that Quora does not like folks leaving the site hence all the nonsense above.

For every claim I made there are witnesses, confessions, reports, documents, forensics, and more evidence even than that. While Hungarian Jews were being deported to Auschwitz the Polish Resistance was spying on the entire operation and recording what was happening.

Yad Vashem, who tallies these things, has been able to identify the names and fates of 4.5 million victims. These names exist in a database online and it is by no means complete.

Often it is remarked how the Nazis failed. How in the end, the Jewish people survived the Reich does not. At the same time, the Nazis sadly succeeded in their efforts.

Before WW2 3 million Polish Jews were thriving all over the country. They have created a unique Polish-Hebrew culture and contributed greatly to the economy, the arts, and labor in general. They were farmers, artists, business owners, soldiers, and everything in between. Today- 20,000 remain and Poland is not unique.

For more informative maps and information about the Holocaust view

Anyway, it is late- I am wonky. I tried to edit but will do another pass-through in the AM. Thank you all

Try six million.

And they thought that there was a very good reason.

There wasn’t of course, since the vast, vast majority of those 6 million had nothing to do with any sort of imaginary conspiracy against the German state and people, but the Nazis believed that the Jews were somehow racially committed to crime and sedition.

Boiled down very simply, in the cod-mystical nonsense ideology which had fed Nazism, the Jews were the darkness, evil, the Devil, and the “Aryan” Germanic people were light, good, God. The Jews, the Nazis believed, were obliged to agitate and undermine the German people, and so had to be exterminated to prevent it.

The Eternal Jew, a popular propaganda film of the time. Link to the film below.

Jews were synonymous with Bolshevism, with organised crime, with capitalism, with race mixing, with degeneracy, with globalism, with basically anything the ultra-nationalist Nazis didn’t like. So they had to get out of Germany and Europe.

The Nazis never envisaged killing them all originally; the original plan was simply evacuation. It was only the war, and the invasion of Poland, which served as stepping stones to the eventual attempted destruction of an entire race in Europe.

Footnotes

The figure is estimated from Nazi records and the drop in the Jewish population. The number of Jewish dead was almost certainly not less than five million and not more than eight million, so six million is a reasonable estimate.

Numbers of Roma dead are even harder to estimate as they were less well-documented, but certainly in the hundreds of thousands.

Then the Nazis also killed the disabled, trans and gay people, Slavs, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and general political opponents, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few [Freemasons]. Jews were the largest single group of victims, but still only just over half of the civilians who were murdered.

Reading the comments I feel torn. One side of me wants to cry even having to think about all this inhumanity of the shoah, the other side is confused as to why people demonize the germans this much (in the same way the Nazis dehumanized jews).

As other have already stated, up to 500 people died per day AFTER liberation. That means 500 people a day even though the liberated inmates were given medical treatment and food. Now imagine their condition pre-liberation:
Yes, there was no food. Yes, there was no medical attention given to the prisoners. Infact there was nothing for them. The nearby cities were being bombed into pieces, germans from the east and from the west were streaming inland to flee from the war. Unlike the US army which used trucks (ironically the autobahn helped them) the Wehrmacht used trains to transport their supplies. These were bombed too. The entire infrastructure of the German state was collapsing. Millions of people torn out of their daily lifes. Not many people were working. The economy was in ruins. I want to bring in a little personal story at this point: My grandmother was a jew in Nazi Germany so was my grandfather. They were both in hiding near Dortmund and had evaded the german authorities because they managed to fake a ‘pure’ german ancestry and pretend to be germans. Yet, in April 1945 she died. How did a wealthy upper class woman die? My families house in Dortmund was bombed and my uncle died in the fire. Society had completely collapsed and with all their wealth destroyed with in one night they lived on the street and spent the day going through the rubble to look for something to sell. Their food consisted of roasted RATS sold at the street corner by children who had trapped them. There wasn’t a single grain for even someone considered german to spare. Everything that still was produced went to the front or wasn’t able to reach the city because the train lines were kaputt. Husband at war, a wealthy woman in her 40s starved one night because she had given all her food to her four kids. My question here is: Why do any of you think that anyone in Germany at that time even thought of sending any aid, food or any medicine to a military installation somewhere on the country side or outside of town while the nations army was in disarray, society for normal people had collapsed to the point that even wealthy people did not get a helping hand and small children were dying from hunger. Even my grandmother who was Jewish herself, did not think a second of helping her own people. My grandfather who survived the war after being captured and taken as prisoner told me over and over that I should not hate germans and not even the average german soldier for what happened; hate the leaders who were responsible. He was witness of the total collapse of the military. The internal planing and logistics infrastructure had collapsed that his part of the front didn’t receive fuel any more. A tank without fuel is a sitting duck and his entire division was forced to surrender. Thank god he was able to surrender and survive. But what he told me I still carry on in my heart. Don’t mistake negligence with cruelness. I doubt that even if the germans had wanted to keep my people alive to slave away for the war efford they couldn’t have done it in that situation.

This is not the first time in history that this has happened. It’s clear the german leadership did persecute with the aim to erase them as seen in the eastern camps and the gas chambers. But these conditions in the camps at the end of the war were what to was expected of a crumbling empire. As reference look into photographs of concentration camps during the civil war Andersonville National Historic Site - Wikipedia. Ask yourself is this evidence of a cruel campaign of extermination through typhus and starvation against the american people … by other american people?

I am so sick of this sort of nonsense, I really am. I have more respect for Hitler himself than I have for Holocaust deniers; it's the most crass stupidity, even without getting into how grossly offensive it is.

Ask yourself this: what do you know about cremation, exactly? And are you thinking that the crematoria of Auschwitz etc were the same as the ones at your local funeral parlour?

Seriously, ditch all this nonsense and just admit you hate all the Jews. I can take people who are out and out antisemites way more seriously than people who try to pick holes in historical events to mask their true agenda. Just come out with it and say you hate Jews; it'll save you wasting our time and yours.

No. No one had ever built death factories before or tried to industrialise murder. How could people know what was coming?

At best they knew things were bad and going to get worse. Once they knew the antesemites were in power and there was no resistance to them, people like my grandparents decided to decamp. Things could only get worse, and once they weren't allowed to own property or businesses, why stay?

After the war, when the truth about the Holocaust was revealed to the world and the evidence was there to see, many struggled to believe that the people who gave the world Beethoven and Goethe could also do this. They couldn't believe what they read and saw. So imagine how hard it was to imagine to before that evidence.

I’ve said it again and again about the Holocaust and other genocides: Why does it matter?

What if it was 4 million, 1.5 million, or even 500.000? Does it make ANY difference?

You know, there’s a thing called Dunbar's number. This anthropologist made a study and concluded that an average person has an average of 150 friends throughout his life. Assuming that an average person lives, say, 70 years do you know how many years he would have to live to know and befriend (or hate) 1.5 million individuals?

Seven hundred thousand years.

Add acquaintances and short temper and it will probably go down to 100.000 years. Or less. It doesn’t matter. Because the whole of humanity, homo sapiens, was hardly present that far back.

This guy, if alive today, would barely have enough time to befriend (or hate) 1.5 million people:

And that’s “just” Auschwitz!

And sure, it was not the first time Homo Sapiens did this. But it was the first time he did it in modern times as ruthlessly and efficiently and for no other reason than “because I thought so” than the Holocaust.

Yes- it is an established fact. Tell you what, I am going to take you through it all bit by bit and show you exactly why every historian on earth has come to the conclusion that around 6 (actually 5.5–6 million) million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Ok- not let’s dive in.

Operation Reinhard: 1.5 million to 2 million killed

From October 1941 through November 1943 the Nazis enacted Operation Reinhard which was a concerted effort to eradicate the Jewish population in Europe.

4 camps specifically were used. These were the extermination camps

• Belzec: 500k
• Treblinka: 900k
• Sobibor: 250k
• Lublin: 130k

Now, these camps were brutal. Jews would arrive, be killed, and then burned in massive pits. A small number of Jews (a few thousand at each camp) would cut down trees and burn the bodies.

Now how do we know? What is the evidence?

Well, we have the Korherr Reports and Hofle Telegram. Both documents were produced in 1943 and tallied the total Jews killed in Operation Reinhard through the end of 1942. Both documents confirm 1.2 million dead already (with 11 more months to go).

We also have

1. Witnesses. These include confessions from camp guards, Jewish survivors, and nearby locals. One crucial one was Franciszek Ząbecki who saw each train arrive full and depart empty.
2. Train Schedules/Way-bills: We have precise documentation on exactly how many Jews were sent to each camp. We know the dates the train arrived and the number of Jews on each train
3. Physical evidence: Studies have found massive burial grounds for the ashes.

Auschwitz: 1 million killed

We have train schedules, deportation documents, and Nazi telegrams that show 1.1 million Jews were sent to Auschwitz. Most camp from Hungary (438k) and Poland (350k).

At the camp we have witnesses. Hans Stark, Filip Muller, Henryk Tauber, Rudolf Hoss to name a few. They all confirm the usage of gas chambers, the process of cremation, and all the details we know.

We know for a fact about 850k Jews were gassed. We then know about 150k Jews were killed in the camp or died from starvation, execution, disease, or some other factor

Einsatzgruppen: 1.5 million killed

These were mobile killing squads that operated behind the front lines. They each sent in reports constantly about exactly how many people they were killing. The most famous (below) is the Jager report.

Now from these reports (over 300) we can tally around 1.5 million Jews killed.

We also have

1. Einsatzgruppen confessions- including from commanders and soldiers
2. Mass graves at the locations of reported massacres
3. Villages where the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews suddenly had no more Jews
1. And no transfer documents exist for almost all other Jewish deportations

Ghettos, smaller camps, Jewish uprisings, Chelmno, minor Axis nations: 1 million killed

Obviously, these are a ton of events. Here too we have an insane pile of proof that again includes Nazi confessions, survivor's accounts, bodies, Nazis documents, allied documents- the list goes on.

• Lodz Ghetto: 200k
• Warsaw Ghetto: 90k
• Lublin Ghetto: 30k
• Chelmno concentration camp: 200k
• Theresienstadt: 40k
• Sonderaktion Tannenberg: 20k
• A-B Aktion: 40k
• Trostinets concentration camp: 65k
• Aktion Erntefest (3 other camps): 43k
• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: 50k
• Croatia/Bulgaria/Romanian war crimes against Jews: 250k

Total: 1,028,000

So in total- 5.5 million

Now there is still more very likely. The Nazis went to great effort to cover up what they did and we are certainly likely still missing things.

In total, we know about 6 million Jewish “vanished” from the face of the earth.

This is why we don’t have an exact number. We know the post-war Jewish population but the pre-war Jewish population estimate varies from 15.8–16.6 million. Thus while we can prove 5.5 million died by what I laid out above, we know that 5–6 million Jews also vanished.

The Nazis went to great efforts to cover up their crimes. They dug up mass graves to burn the bodies, the leveled extermination camps, they used coded language and the burned documents. So while we have plenty of evidence there may be massacres that are missing from the record.

Below is a directive from one of the top-ranking SS leaders laying out this secrecy

Now holocaust deniers claim that

1. Every missing Jew is just hanging around waiting to be discovered
2. They all immigrated to Israel (despite no evidence)
3. The numbers are forged by an international cabal of Jews who get to every historian, document, and control every nation on earth.

Now rational people who don’t hate Jews know very clearly that those 6 million “missing people” were in fact murdered by the Nazis.

It’s sad to be so academic about such a thing so let us all remember something.

From 1933–1945 the Jewish population of Germany and Europe endured the unendurable. They were tortured, experimented on, butchered, raped, and dehumanized in the largest act of genocide in human history. The brutality of the Holocaust stands alone even in the often shameful memory of our collective history.

I will leave you with this- the witness testimony of Filip Muller who witnessed the gassing of Jews. It stuck with me and I hope I can pass it on to you so we can all remember that we are not talking about statistics, we are talking about people.

You see, once the gas was poured in, it worked like this: it rose from the ground upwards. And in the terrible struggle that followed – because it was a struggle – the lights were switched off in the gas chambers. It was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realised that the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better. That caused the struggle.

Secondly, most people tried to push their way to the door. It was psychological – they knew where the door was, maybe they could force their way out. It was instinctive, a death struggle.

Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, always wound up at the bottom. The strongest were on top. Because in the death struggle, a father didn’t realise his son lay beneath him”.

A group of women and children getting ready to be killed at Babi Yar

Because it was cheaper, faster and not as stressful on the troops. Indeed, in Eastern Europe at first they opted to just round up the local Jews and shoot them at an appropriate location. In Kiev, the Ukrainan capital, the location was found in the Babi Yar ravine, not far from today’s blood center and n. 9 hospital. People, mostly Jews but also antinazists and other people, were rounded up, brought to the ravine, forced to strip naked, taken inside the ravine, forced to lay on the already dead bodies and shot. Overtime this became too tiresome for the soldiers, plus the victims themselves, knowing what was going to happen, went into hiding and ran away, or tried to resist, increasing the risk for the soldiers. Pogroms also occurred in many other places of the current Poland, Ukraine, Bielorussia, and Russia.

A scene from Conspiracy, a 2001 TV movie about the Wannsee Conference

At the Wannsee Conference, then, it was decided that the best way to deal with the Jews was to use extermination camps. Jews were already made recognizable, and lived in a state of apartheid, forced into limited neighborhoods and unable to do most jobs. The resistance of the Jews would be weakened by ordering them to submit to more and more restrictive measures, then forcing them to board trains headed to Vernichtungslager (extermination camps).

Forced labour at the Dachau camp in the 1930’s

Nazis already had a wide experience managing concentration camps, the first formal Lager was established in 1933 in Dachau and it served as imprisonment and death structure for political opposers of nazism and other people. In these camps the prisoners weren’t directly killed but they were subject to statvation, sleep deprivation, exposure, lack of medical care, brutality from the guards and from the kapos (the prisoner functionnaries that helped the guards), and forced hard labor which drove most of the prisoners to death.

Nazis established six extermination camps in Poland (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the latter was a subcamp of an already existing work camp) plus a smaller one that only briefly operated in Belarus, near Minsk, at Maly Trostenets. Jews were rounded from the ghettoes, forced to board trains (they traveled on boxcars, or sometimes on open topped train cars, morer rarely on regular passenger trains, for which they had to pay a ticket), traveled without receiving any food or water for days in conditions of extreme overcrowding. Those who survived the travel were then usually directed straight at the gas chambers.

Men and women get separated on arrival and immedately sent to the gas chambers

This system allowed for minimal contacts between guards and the Jews waiting to be “processed” (that’s the term used by the SS administration of the lagers), that is to say crammed in a gas chamber, gassed to death, and then cremated. The prisoners were forced into the train boxcars. The guards either travelled on a separate and comfortable car or didn’t even travel with the train, the camp guards took over on arrival. The guards would overview the selection process if there was one, than other prisoners that had been selected for that job (aka Sonderkommando) would direct the newly arrived jews to the “showers”, tell them to strip down in an anteroom, usher them in the “shower room”. A guard would then drop the poison in the gas chamber, and after half an hour the cas chamber would be unsealed, aerated, more prisoners would go in, load the corpses on a lift and transfer them to the crematory, where more Sonderkommando prisonders would load them into the crematories, and then crush the ashes and partially burned bones. It was basically a death assembly line where the workers that operated the machinery were also jews while only the responsibiles were nazis, but just like the plant director at an automotive plant the nazis would not directly dirty their hands with the killing, on most days. Just overview the workers and occasionally deal some discipline (except that the discipline was dealt with whips, truncheons, and bullets).

As the red army advanced, the easternmost of the death camps were closed one by one, including Sobibor that was closed due to an escape of all of the camp inmates (a few hundred people, Jews and Red Army POWs, who served the extermination process as forced laborers). Also, the need of more laborers brought the need to occasionally select the Jews for forced labor. When a camp was in need of extra workers, the incoming Jews would be raked to single out a few that were deemed able to work, while the rest would be immediately sent to the gas chambers.

Original question: Why do right-wingers claim that the Nazis only killed 6-8 million people, even though that was just the Holocaust (the total is 16-18 million)?

It has nothing to do with “right-wing”, or any other hockey position.

There is scholarly dispute of what the “Holocaust” consisted of, naturally. The Holocaust was not a feature of World War II, in principle. A common feature (lamentably) of war (nearly any war) is civilian casualties; they happen from many causes. The other victims (and there were likely more than 18 million) are treated as casualties of war, and not victims of the Holocaust.

When many people think of victims of the National Socialists, they may tend to think of only the Holocaust; that’s not unique to the hockey player you mention in the question.

That passively hoping that things will get better doesn’t work, and neither does assimilating into society.

Antisemitism is a near historical constant; it doesn’t matter how well integrated the Jews are, or how strictly they keep themselves to themselves, persecution and oppression will continue to spring up again and again and again.

The Holocaust was the most extreme expression of antisemitism but it was a gradual process, it didn’t come from nowhere out of nothing.

Hence the State of Israel and its highly militarised stance. Never again, was the general thought behind its establishment.